Re: No surprise
It's not just about where you put your snazzy app stuff. It's also a lot of support infrastructure (Console, Status Page blah blah) is hosted in US-East-1 and not replicated out to other Regions. So a failure of a important service like S3 (that seems to be the pillar of the supporting services) leaves in the dark to reacting to the incident.
If you're in a co-lo DC, at least you can ring the DC support; ask a tech to check what's going on behind the scenes and make a local switch to another piece of kit. On AWS... you even need to automate that failover and even that might break if API breaks.